My goal is lucidity. If your comments clarify mine, so much the better. If you are informed or enlightened or amused or persuaded, so much the better….Rick Subber

Sunday, June 14, 2015

College is not a commodity....and other thoughts

I couldn’t agree more with Hunter Rawlings—college is not a commodity. If the whole college experience had been commoditized, Harvard would
have closed years ago, or it would have survived as a quaint, niche place with
an almost unbelievable history and a stadium named after Lamborghini, its
principal benefactor.

I desperately endorse Rawlings’ observation that students
have to make a personal commitment to making their college experience
worthwhile.

Nevertheless, I think Rawlings is preaching to the choir,
and maybe the wrong choir at that.

My evolving view is that too many people and too many
incompetent (I’ll define this in a sec) people are going to college for reasons
that have nothing to do with intellectual enrichment and a love affair with the
Trivium and the Quadrivium. I love the idea of a liberal arts education and I’m
still working on improving mine. Nevertheless, I think we must acknowledge that
the concept of a liberal arts college education is not the concept embraced by
lots of folks who are in college or who think they want to go to college (or
whose parents are determined that they WILL go to college).

I think lots of college-bound folks imagine a college degree
to be something they have to get, not something they have to invest in. That
is, for these folks, a college education is imagined to be a transactional
experience, not a transformative experience. To wit, get the degree, move on
and get a good job and make good bucks. Of course, it often doesn’t turn out
the way, but that’s a durable modern version of the college dream.

Earlier I suggested that competence to succeed in college is
not a given. “A college education for everyone” is a mad hatter’s slogan. Let’s
just say it: the average person isn’t well-equipped intellectually to do well
in the classical liberal arts milieu, or in any four-year college-level milieu.
If “everybody” could do college, then college wouldn’t be what Rawlings or you
or I like to think it should be.

Rawlings makes an indefensible assumption about the
capability and willingness of the average student “…to take an active and
risk-taking role…to make an investment in their future…to apply themselves to
the daunting task of using their minds…” Of course there are students who can
do it and will do it, lots of them. Certainly, there are lots of students who
can’t and won’t. I’ve taught some of both. Neither group is going to disappear
from the campus.

Rawlings says college is not a commodity. I say far too many
students don’t really want to be students in the sense that Rawlings
envisions—far too many students just want to be customers, and sure, they want
something special, not a commoditized one-size-fits-all, but they aren’t
prepared to do much of anything special to get it.

p.s. here's my tip of the hat to all the profs who bring some Platonic essences into their classrooms.